


A Pea-culiar Affair

by hamsterwoman



Category: Hamster Princess Series - Ursula Vernon
Genre: Fairy Tale Retellings, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:29:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,545
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27905257
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hamsterwoman/pseuds/hamsterwoman
Summary: Unaware of these leguminous machinations, Harriet had beaten Prince Dorian at checkers seven games in a row by the time the queen came back and told Harriet that her bedroom was now ready.
Comments: 10
Kudos: 17
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Pea-culiar Affair

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kitsune_Scribe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitsune_Scribe/gifts).



> Having Harriet take on ["The Princess and the Pea"](http://hca.gilead.org.il/princess.html) would never have occurred to me without your prompt, but I had SO MUCH FUN exploring this idea! 
> 
> Hope you enjoy! Happy Yuletide!
> 
> With thanks to [darkcyan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkcyan/pseuds/darkcyan) and [meguri_aite](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meguri_aite/pseuds/meguri_aite) for the beta.

Once upon a time there lived a prince who wanted to marry a princess -- but only a real princess. His mother the dormouse queen was very insistent on this fact. It is not known why she was convinced that there was some sort of mock princess epidemic which they needed to safeguard against -- actually decoy princesses are quite rare. But the queen had amassed a collection of tricks for telling real princesses apart from fake ones, and never passed up the opportunity to test them out on visiting royalty (and occasionally on the castle servants, as a control group). 

The prince was only eleven years old, so he wouldn’t be marrying anyone for a while, but his parents had taught him that you shouldn’t leave these things up to chance, and that it paid to start preparing for important things well in advance. 

One night there was a terrible storm. Rain was pouring down in sheets and the sky lit up every few seconds with purple flashes of lightning. Suddenly, between two rumbles of thunder, there came a knocking at the castle gate. 

The dormouse king went to open the door (they were a little low on servants at the moment, as the butler had quit after the queen had ambushed him with a sprinkling of princess-diagnosing potpourri the previous Thursday). There he found a very wet hamster, standing next to an equally bedraggled riding quail. She was counting, under her breath, the seconds between the flash of lightning and the roll of thunder, which sounded just as the king opened his mouth to speak. The quail’s topknot was drooping wetly, and the hamster was splattered with mud and had rivulets of water running down her ears, but the king noticed right away that she was also wearing a tiara. 

“Are you a princess, my dear?” asked the dormouse king. 

“I am. I’m Harriet Hamsterbone,” said the hamster.

“Well, come in, come in!” the king said excitedly. “Let’s get you and your quail out of the rain.” 

While Harriet dried Mumfrey off in the stables and made sure that he had enough birdseed to restore his strength after their long, cold slog, the dormouse queen directed her maids in the necessary preparations. In the tower room where the visiting princess would sleep, they stripped all the bedding off the bed-frame so that the queen could place a single sesame seed in the middle of the bed. Then the maids heaped twenty mattresses on top of the sesame seed, and then twenty quail-down beds on top of the mattresses. (You were probably expecting a pea, but keep in mind that to a dormouse or a hamster a pea is about the size of a baseball, so being bothered by one would not necessarily be a very princessy feat. The dormouse queen was taking no chances.) 

Harriet warmed up over tomato soup, grilled cheese sandwiches, and hot tea, and was then shown up to her room. She looked at the tower of mattresses on the bed, and the far-off rolling clouds of quail-down on top of them, and thought this was a weird way to sleep, but she was very tired and was willing to give it a try. She climbed up to the top of the bed and tried to find a comfortable position. But however she turned, she felt like a cherry on top of a very wobbly sundae. A pretty lonely cherry. She’d spent the last ten nights sleeping on the hard ground, in the cold, sometimes waking up wet with dew, but her quail Mumfrey had always been at her side, and that made for better sleep than all the mattresses and feather beds in the kingdom.

The perfect thing to do with all these quail-down beds and mattresses, thought Harriet, would be to build a blanket-and-mattress-and-down-bed fort. One could build an entire blanket acropolis with so much bedding! And then she could sneak Mumfrey up to the room with her and sleep cuddled up next to him inside the fort. Harriet was worried that Mumfrey would be bothered by the thunder down at the stables, without her there. And there would be plenty of room for them both in the mattress fortress. 

Harriet crept down the tower stairs -- there were not as many of them as in her tower room back home, only 84, so they were easier to creep down -- and then tip-toed back up them with Mumfrey. He helped her pull down the feather-beds and the mattresses, and to arrange them into a large but cozy fort against the tower wall. 

Harriet insisted on building mattress parapets and piling up quail-down heaps into embrasures from which you could pour hot tea down on any attackers foolish enough to tangle with an invincible hamster princess. Once all the mattresses were off the bed, transformed into walls and ramparts and merlons, Mumfrey pecked up the queen’s sesame seed. He’d worked up an appetite again, hauling the heavy bedding, and sesame seeds are actually really good for quail. Then Mumfrey joined Harriet in the nest of bedding at the center of their construction. She snuggled up under his wing, and together they fell asleep, the rumble of thunder and patter of rain outside now soothing under the walls of their fort. 

Mumfrey woke up early in the morning and poked Harriet awake with his beak. 

“Qwerrk!” said Mumfrey, which was Quail for, “Get up! We have to put all these mattresses back!” 

“Three-fifths done with the mattresses,” muttered Harriet, wrestling the twelfth mattress on top of the eleventh one. “Who would even want to sleep on so many.” 

They got all the bedding in order and Mumfrey back to the stables and Harriet back in her room, only slightly winded from the run up the stairs, just as the maid came in to call Harriet down to breakfast. 

“How did you sleep, my dear?” asked the queen as Harriet was eating her oatmeal. 

“Great!” Harriet said. “It was a really cool fort-- I mean, it was a really comfortable bed. All those mattresses! Very cozy.” The queen was frowning, but Harriet thought she’d managed to cover up her slip. 

“Well, Mumfrey and I will be off this morning,” she said. “We’re going to fight the Ogre of Oughterside. Thank you for breakfast. And the mattresses.” 

Once Harriet had gone, the queen and her maids went up to the tower room and took all the quail-down beds and mattresses off the bed frame, expecting to find the sesame seed which would prove that their hamster visitor was not a real princess at all. But the seed was gone. 

“It must’ve fallen off the bed frame somehow,” mused the dormouse queen. “So there’s a chance that she was a real princess after all. I suppose we will never know…” 

But on an evening three days later, the dormice heard another knock on the castle gate. 

Harriet stood in front of the door, with leaves and brambles stuck in her fur and in Mumfrey’s feathers, and tufts of ogre-hair all over her clothes. 

“Could we spend another night in your castle?” asked Harriet. “Mumfrey and I have defeated the Ogrecat of Oughterside, but Mumfrey is really tired, and he really liked your birdseed last time.”

“Of course!” said the queen, who was eager to have another chance to test Harriet’s princess status. “Come in and have some cookies and tea while the maids prepare your room.” 

Harriet settled Mumfrey at the stables, got washed up, and sat down to have cookies and tea with the dormice. She played checkers with shy prince Dorian and answered the king’s questions about the tactics of fighting ogrecats. 

Meanwhile, the queen was directing her maids in arranging the tower room. 

“Let’s use five mattresses this time,” said the queen, “and sixteen-- no, make that fourteen quail-down beds.” And she put a pea down on the bedframe, to be covered up with the mattresses and the down. 

Unaware of these leguminous machinations, Harriet had beaten Prince Dorian at checkers seven games in a row by the time the queen came back and told Harriet that her bedroom was now ready. 

“Sleep well!” the queen called after her in what Harriet thought was a strangely ominous fashion. 

But Harriet found that she was not at all sleepy yet. The bed was no longer piled quite so ridiculously high (“Just one fourth the mattresses and seven-tenths of the down beds,” Harriet thought to herself), but now it looked invitingly bouncy. Harriet climbed up on it and tested out the mattress springs. 

It was as if the bed had been designed for jumping on! The stacked mattresses trampolined Harriet up to the ceiling every time she bounced, and the down bedding made for a cloud-soft landing. Harriet also noticed that if she pushed the bed just a little bit over to the right, she would be able to use the mattress bounce to send herself sailing right through the tower window: perfect tower-diving conditions! 

It had been several weeks since she’d gotten to go cliff-diving or tower-diving (a favorite pastime of hers since she had realized she was invincible until her twelfth birthday), so of course she couldn’t pass up the chance. Harriet jumped on the bed until she’d built up some momentum, then launched herself through the window, cannonballing into the courtyard. The wicked fairy’s curse kept her safe and sound, so all she had to do was run up the tower stairs (counting off their fractions as she climbed each one), jump onto the bed, bounce-bounce-bounce! -- then dive out the window, and start the circuit again. 

At Hamsterbone Castle, the guards and the gardeners and the servants were all used to Harriet’s hobbies and calmly went about their business as she jumped off towers, practiced her axe-throwing in the courtyard, or vaulted Mumfrey over the flowerbeds while tilting at the ring. The dormouse guards were not prepared for tower-diving. But once they saw that Harriet bounced up from each death-defying plunge none the worse for wear, they gathered around in little clumps, counting her mid-air somersaults and taking bets on how long it would take her to run up the tower steps and emerge in her next dive. 

Prince Dorian, whose bedroom was in another tower room across the courtyard from Harriet’s, heard the cheering guards and looked out his window just in time to see something small and furry plummeting from the top of the guest wing tower, spinning like a bowling ball headed for a strike. 

“This doesn’t seem very princess-like,” Prince Dorian said to himself. Even the insufficiently real (according to his mother) princesses he’d known tended to be pale and melancholy, and were much more likely to demonstrate their prowess by balancing a book on their head than by plunging head-first off the top of a tower. But it did look like the hamster princess was having a lot of fun… 

Oblivious to her audience, Harriet finished her fifteenth dive -- and then climbed into bed for good. Having finally exhausted herself, she fell asleep in the nest of slightly disordered quail-down bedding. 

The queen, the king, and Prince Dorian peeked into Harriet’s bedroom in the morning. Harriet was still soundly asleep, snuggled up to her sword and snoring loudly. 

“A real princess would never be able to sleep with a pea in her bed,” said the queen, shaking her head. 

“Maybe the pea disappeared, like the sesame seed?” the dormouse king suggested. “I remember reading about this Harriet Hamsterbone in Rodent Royalty Quarterly. She’s been cursed by a wicked fairy, something about pricking her finger on her twelfth birthday, I think hamster wheels are involved. And you know wicked fairies: they only curse real princesses -- matter of pride in their work, they say.”

“Crazy Princess Hamsterbone,” the queen sniffed. “You can’t tell me a real princess would have a nickname like Crazy Princess Hamsterbone.”

Harriet left in the morning, and the queen promptly checked to see that the pea was still there, under all the mattresses. 

“You see -- not a real princess,” she said, shaking her head. “But I must admit, I’m curious now: if she can fall asleep in awful conditions like this and snore like a marmot, I wonder what else she could manage to sleep on…”

“Too bad you won’t be able to investigate that further,” said the king. “She probably won’t be passing this way again. I heard she’s chased off the Bandits of Bampton Heath, frightened all the local ogrecats into vegetarianism, and they canceled the Oughterside joust after she made last year’s champion cry in the qualifying round.” 

“She’s really good at checkers,” Prince Dorian said softly. “And at running up the stairs. And cannonballs.” 

Two weeks later, just as the king, queen, and Prince Dorian were sitting down to dinner, they heard a by-now-familiar stompy hammering on the castle gate. 

When Prince Dorian opened the door, the hamster standing behind it was slightly singed, decidedly sooty, and exceedingly grumpy. Her battle quail’s feathers were also covered in ash. 

“What are you staring at?” Harriet muttered. “Haven’t you ever seen someone who’s fought a hydra before?” 

“Qu-werk!” said Mumfrey, which was Quail for, “Maybe don’t be rude to the people you’ll be asking to feed us dinner. I really like their birdseed and don’t want them to send us away.” 

“A hydra?” said Dorian. “You fought a hydra all by yourself?” 

“Well, not by myself, obviously!” Harriet grumbled. “Mumfrey helped. And it’s really just a matter of keeping track of the fraction of the heads you’ve cut off.” (Harriet would have normally been happier to talk about her battles and conquests, but she’d managed to burn off several patches of her own fur while juggling a torch in one hand -- for burning the stumps of cut-off hydra heads to prevent two heads from springing up in their place -- and her sword in the other, so she was in a very cranky mood.) 

Prince Dorian led Harriet inside the castle and hung around her while she settled Mumfrey into his by-now-favorite stall at the stables. The prince asked a lot of questions, which Harriet answered first grudgingly, then, with Mumfrey’s prompting to be polite (“Qwerk!”), with increasing enthusiasm as she got into her hero-ing stories. No, she hadn’t fought a hydra before this, but she’d learned how from a book. Yes, she’d fought dragons, and they were much easier to defeat. Yes, she rode Mumfrey to joust and into battle, and he had trained himself to attack by charging at the scarecrows in the Hamsterbone Castle gardens. No, she hadn’t made the champion of the Oughterside joust cry -- she had made him sneeze uncontrollably because it turned out he was allergic to weasel-wolf fur, and she still had some stuck to her clothes because she had been hurrying to make the joust straight from her last adventure. 

Prince Dorian brought Harriet to the castle kitchens and stuck by her side while the maids gave her tea and sandwiches for supper, and asked her even more questions about the itinerant hero life. (Yes, she’d rescued quite a few princesses; they were pale and melancholy and not very interesting. No, it hadn’t been that hard to learn how to sleep on the ground while traveling, but she did miss her bed. Yes, she did get homesick occasionally, but usually Mumfrey got homesick first, and anyway, she was always writing letters home.) 

A servant came in to tell Harriet a bed had been made up for her in the same tower room as before. She walked up the stairs, for once feeling too tired even to list the fractions as she went up each step. The hydra had left her pretty beat. 

Harriet opened the door and froze. Instead of the five or twenty mattresses she had been expecting, crowned by a cloud-like heap of feather-beds, there was only a single mattress and a single quail-down bed -- and from the way they bulged, Harriet could tell that something was lurking underneath them. Something large and round and ominously still. 

Assassins! Harriet thought excitedly. She’d always wanted to surprise some assassins and thwart their nefarious plans. (She hoped the assassins weren’t here for her, because only very stupid assassins would go after someone who was invincible until her twelfth birthday, and Harriet did not want her first assassin-thwarting adventure to be tarnished by facing particularly stupid assassins. No, hopefully they were here to try to murder Prince Dorian or the king, or maybe whichever princess had stayed in this tower room previously.) 

Moving swiftly but silently, Harriet unsheathed her sword and tiptoed closer to the bed and the mysterious thing hidden under the mattress. Then, with a battle cry, she lunged forward, aiming straight for the heart of… whatever it was. 

Feathers and down exploded everywhere as Harriet’s sword sliced cleanly through the bedding and clanked abruptly against something unyielding and hard underneath the layers of down. There was no yelling or cries of surrender, so Harriet whacked the thing again and again with her sword, whirling inside a cloud of white fluff. 

The assassins continued to be quiet, and hard, and… spherical? As she chopped through the fabric and feathers and mattress stuffing to clear a view of the foe she’d been fighting, she realized that the thing hidden under the mattress was a large walnut, about a quarter of the size of a hamster girl. 

Harriet paused in her assault. Even her active imagination did not stretch as far as assassin walnuts. But perhaps.... assassins hidden inside a walnut? Harriet thought a venomous spider could definitely fit inside a walnut, and would make a very respectable assassin. 

She used the tip of her sword to poke into the cracks and holes she’d smashed into the walnut shell in her earlier attack, but no spiders or centipedes or zombie-making wasps tried to grab her blade or escape. Harriet had to concede that the walnut was probably just a walnut, which somebody had stashed under her mattress for some reason. 

Just then, the servants and the guards and the king and the queen and Prince Dorian, all of whom had heard Harriet’s battle cry and come running, reached the top of the tower stairs and crashed into the room, panting from the climb. 

Harriet was standing in the middle of the room, with her sword still drawn, looking rather fiercer than any hamster could be expected to look, especially while being covered in feathers. 

“Oh dear!” said the queen. “I definitely did not expect this experimental outcome.”

“Are you alright, my dear?” asked the dormouse king. 

“I’m fine!” Harriet scoffed, “but I’m sorry about the bed. I thought there were assassins.”

“No assassins here!” piped up a voice from somewhere inside the bed. (Harriet was almost certain it wasn’t the walnut.) “Just going about my business, doing a bit of honest burglary, when I was ambushed and attacked!”

The bed rocked as something wiggled underneath it, and then a very disheveled pocket mouse emerged from hiding, carefully keeping as much solid furniture between Harriet and himself as possible. 

“You!” yelped the pocket mouse, once he’d gotten a good look at his attacker. “Crazy Princess Hamsterbone! I should’ve known.” 

“You!” Harriet shouted at the same time. “Didn’t you and your whole gang promise me to stop robbing people? Your bandit chief told me you were all going to take up macrame instead!” 

“Macrame!” the pocket mouse said bitterly, continuing to back away from Harriet. “When I’m the best pickpocket in three generations, in a family of legendary pickpockets! It would be a crime to give up my art.”

“Also,” he added, edging towards the door, “I didn’t think you would chase me to a whole different kingdom.” 

Harriet decided not to correct his misunderstanding of the situation. She lifted her sword meaningfully and took a step towards the intruder, dislodging some feathers which had landed on the top of her head. The pickpocket mouse, who had reached the safety of the crowd at the door, squeaked and hid behind one of the guards. 

“Well,” said the dormouse king. “That was certainly exciting. Guards, I suppose you had best arrest this poor fellow. And thank you, Princess Harriet, for apprehending a thief in our castle. That was bravely done!” 

Then Prince Dorian, who had been staring at Harriet with his mouth open since coming into the room, spoke up with uncharacteristic decisiveness. 

“Mom, dad, I don’t care about marrying a princess anymore. I want to marry a hero! Not you, Harriet,” he added hastily. “I mean, you’re really great at checkers, and I like your quail, but you’re a little scary.” 

“As you wish, dear,” said the queen. “But only a real hero, of course. I know this really great trick for telling them apart -- you need a sword, and a large stone--” 

Harriet perked up at the sound of that. Even though she had no intention of marrying Dorian, walloping a rock with a magic sword or even (as she guessed the queen probably meant) wrestling a sword from a boulder sounded like fun. She wouldn’t mind trying that herself -- but that would be a completely different adventure.


End file.
